Final Word

By studying the variety of his poetry which included hymns and ballads we can see the diversity of his works and his greatness lies in the fact that he received recognition for not just one but various types of poetry. Variety in poetry also reflects the innate capabilities of a poet and the development in an authors poetic abilities over time. Right through his life Kipling experimented with various forms of poetry. Starting of with brief witty verses he went on to create some of the most memorable poems in English Literature. This reflects the improvement in poetic skills that he underwent throughout his career. Among these poetic skills, brilliant and rhetorical verse and power, originality and sincerity form the corner stone of his works. His capability to combine strength and exactness without sacrificing one for the other amazes critics even today. Kipling displays his real strength in fluency of rhyme, control of rhythm, and an intense awareness of the dramatic possibilities of different patterns (Henn, T.R.). His innate ability to reach the literary class who reads for style, the average reader who reads for amusement and the non-reading class who read out of fascinated towards his familiarity with their material world of commerce, trade, and machinery; through his works, places him among the best poets of all time (Lawrence, Frederic). Kipling through his works has not only given the English Language some of its most famous and most frequently quoted phrases but also has coined new words thus adding vocabulary to the English Language. According to Lawrence Frederic, Kipling parallels Shakespeare in his ability to write metaphorical verses. Kipling’s verse, on the strength of its force, sincerity, realism, crispness, coherence and Kipling’s use of rhyme and figurative language deserves the title of great verse.

Inspite of Kipling’s ability to write great verse he has faced invidious remarks about his poems and poetic skills from several critics of the past and the present. Critics have condemned his verse and refused to acknowledge it as poetry. Some critics vehemently deny Kipling’s claim to poet-hood and strongly believe that he should abstain from attempting to write poetry. At this point understanding Kipling’s aim for writing the kind of verse he writes takes foremost importance. Kipling does not set out to write poetry. Kipling sets out to write verse with the aim of reaching out to individual Humans. His infinite number of fictional characters like "Gunga Din", "Kamal", "McAndrew", "Danny Deever" express Kipling’s aim. We can infer from this that for Kipling the importance lays on human nature and the man as a single entity and not on mankind in general. Kipling also does not set out to write cryptic poetry filled with underlying meanings which display themselves on repeated readings. He wants to write verse for the amusement of the laymen as well as the literate so he tries to write simplified verse. But in trying to address such a varied audience through the same verse, his verse loses its appeal to any singular group of people. Also due to the variety displayed by Kipling in his verse, unlike other poets classified as poets of heroism, of adventure, of the sea, of politics and of other fields; Kipling proves himself as a poet of all the above classifications and many more and due to this, categorization of Kipling into any one class by the critics proves impossible. Thus Kipling faced literary criticism not because his verse lacked quality but because he wrote in a new style and for a new purpose for which critics did not have the proper tools of analysis. Thus Rudyard Kipling, a writer in a class of his own and unparalleled in literary history, wrote great poetry and deserves just as much recognition for his poetry as he receives for his works in other genres.